Inside the Financial Times’ Instagram strategy

The publisher boasts 515,000 Instagram followers, up from about 286,000 a year ago, and it’s adding about 5,000 followers a week'The publisher first thought “lighter” lifestyle content would perform better on Stories, but news content tends to perform better, said Grovum. 

Information and news on topics like the Federal Reserve have the highest views and engagement, and Grovum’s team tries to build narratives around pieces about hot topics like Brexit or Trump updates. The idea is to tell a story using the Stories format versus static Instagrams. The FT is prioritizing audience responses, and Grovum suggests using questions at the end of Stories to ask for thoughts and comments.The most attractive thing about Instagram for Grovum is that it isn’t built for shareability — the idea is to use it to connect readers to the brand. "

https://digiday.com/media/inside-financial-times-instagram-strategy/?utm_source=API+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=b05f0d269c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-b05f0d269c-31701933

Newsonomics: The Financial Times triples its profits and swaps champagne flutes for martini glasses

Ken Doctor reporting:
The FT is a leader in crossing over from print — digital subscribers now make up 70 percent of its paying audience, a number that keeps growing.
...The FT may be 127 years old and roundly and rightfully respected for its journalism. But it doesn’t even break into the top 25 business news websites, as counted by comScore (see chart below). In the U.S. — which became its largest market a few years ago, surpassing the U.K. — FT.com ranks #44, with 804,000 uniques....
“There’s been a lot of internal debate about champagne and martinis,” Ridding said. That’s as in narrowly fluted champagne glasses and wide-brimmed martini. Simply put, the FT’s paywall marketing caught too few potential customers. Widen the top of the glass — or the overused metaphorical top of the funnel of reader acquisition — and more potential subscribers can be snared. Ridding says the FT has tested the $1 full-access-for-a-month approach in several geographic and business sector markets. It likes what it sees and projects a conversion rate of 11 to 29 percent. ...

What Newspapers Can Learn From Brands

mediashift reporting:
A few weeks ago, the Financial Times announced it was taking the next steps in its “digital first” strategy, which includes consolidating its print edition, shifting from “reactive reporting” to “news in context,” and altering its production schedule to serve an audience that expects updates throughout the day.
There’s been so much conversation lately about how everyone is a publisher and how much brands are learning from media in creating their own “branded content.” But, as the Financial Times move shows, the inverse is also true. What FT is doing might seem innovative for a newspaper, but it’s the kind of strategy global brands have been using for years: You have to meet your audience. That means creating content for conversation, providing information that’s useful or elicits an emotional response, and crafting a voice. Crafting a voice is a major strategy brands have adopted to get digital content right, and it’s something that traditional media outlets should mimic.
The modern audience has less time and more options for news than ever before. To make a newspaper’s content stand out, it’s essential to provide content that captures attention and sparks the viewer’s imagination. In other words, it’s essential for a newspaper to think like a brand.

Engagement

Engagement is one of the biggest challenges facing the newspaper industry. The Nieman Journalism Lab reported in June that while 61.5 percent of American Internet users reported visiting a newspaper’s website in May, just 1.7 percent of the total time Americans spent online that month was on a newspaper’s website.
The key to engaging the modern audience is to make shareable content. We live in the age of social, and if a story doesn’t elicit an emotional or intellectual response in a reader, it will get passed by. That doesn’t mean every post has to be funny or highbrow, but it does mean that content should have a voice.
Brands, especially the larger ones, have understood this for a long time. Giving a multi-national conglomerate a voice is by no means an easy feat, but it’s one of the most important things that brands are doing to enhance their reputations. Examples of brands with strong voices are GE and IBM, which have crafted their content around innovations in science and technology. Both sponsor general interest science and technology magazines with large followings, as well as Tumblr blogs showcasing their work.

Value-added context

FT’s addition of “value-added context” to its digital first strategy underscores the importance of adding voice to content. Changing from reactive reporting to value-added news — meaning adding analysis and point of view pieces — is smart.
The race to be first in reporting a story is leading to irrelevant news that doesn’t make the audience any smarter, well informed or engaged. People are emotional and pay close attention to things with context and connection. Social currency is more important than ever, and if a story lacks a voice and contextualizing information, it’s more likely to be overlooked and unshared.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/11/what-newspapers-can-learn-from-brands/?utm_source=MediaShift+Daily&utm_campaign=0c43a0b306-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_70e55682fc-0c43a0b306-286200861

 

FT in Q3: Is this what a sustainable digital news subscription strategy looks like?

the mediabriefing: reporting:
The Financial Times is often seen as one of the first canaries sent down the online news charging mine.
That canary is still very much alive and chirping, but in Pearson's nine-month interim statement FT Group revenues are flat so far in 2013, not normally an encouraging sign for any company.  
In 2011 Pearson described digital subscriptions, which are up 24 percent year on year to 387,000, as the "engine of growth" for the group. Yet in 2012 revenues were up just four percent year on year, and it doesn't look like there will be any top line growth in 2013. Should Pearson be worried?
The FT Group's changing revenue profile suggests there shouldn't be too much cause for alarm.
In 2012:
-- 50 percent of FT Group revenues came from digital and services, up from 31 percent in 2008.
-- 61 percent of revenues came from content, up from 48 percent in 2008.
This is a rebalancing away from print and advertising towards digital content sales. And a look at how people are buying the FT shows the primary driver behind that shift...http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/is-this-what-a-sustainable-newspaper-subscription-strategy-looks-like

Secrets of Financial Times success

 Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
Want to know the secret sauce of the FT’s industry-leading crossover percentage? In February, it offered these numbers: 286,000 print subscribers and 316,000 digital subscribers — the first newspaper to see digital surpass print. Of those 316,000 digital subs, though, 163,780 — or 51 percent of them — are subscriptions bought by companies for their employees. These are business-to-business sales, rather than business-to-consumer sales. Those are the fruit of another ahead-of-the-pack move by the FT. Under Caspar de Bono, FT Direct Licensing has built an first-of-its-kind direct business. Rather than leaving B2B customer sales relationships to aggregators like Lexis Nexis and News Corp.’s Factiva, the FT began converting corporate FT buyers to direct relationships in 2008. It sold those 163,000 digital subs through 2,787 separate annual licenses, up 40 percent from 2011. It also sells an additional 13,000 newspapers a day under these contracts for people who still like the feel of old-fashioned print. In addition, the FT has now extending its direct license business beyond companies to the education industry.
... The FT is working with Flipboard to allow FT subscribers to read its content in that app, following The New York Times’ similar integration. “You paid for it — you decide how you want to read it,” says Grimshaw, noting the “reader is the king in this now.” The job of the FT and publishers generally: “Do the plumbing.” As with the price/cost question of digital subscriptions, it’s becoming blindingly clear that readers don’t care about the mechanics of how they get their stuff, movies, music, TV or news — they just want it to be where they are, when they’re there...

Data assets drive the business

The data team has about 30 people, organized into three groups: Data Analytics & Campaigns, Data Product Development, and Data Technology. It’s a team that’s grown from about a dozen when the FT first started transforming its old-fashioned research group into a digital-forward team, and began hiring analysts from non-media consumer marketing backgrounds. This is the group that has moved to the center of how FT managers make decisions. It’s not seat-of-the-pants intuition; it’s about ideas tested and the data that results that leads to new ideas about how to snare customers. How many of these capabilities do you find inside your news company:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/03/the-newsonomics-of-a-news-company-of-the-future/

Guardian reporting:
There's a predictable buzz of futurology as the FT announces that its digital subscription circulation (301,471 and rising) has passed its print sales (297,227 and falling). How long will it be before pink paper and pounding presses are mere memories? Now, with subscriptions swelling, the FT looks far better placed for such online transition, a digital trailblazer by choice rather than force of circumstance.
Yet hang around for a few more earthbound moments. Nobody, to be honest, can be quite sure yet what such progress means in hard cash terms: the Columbia Journalism Review punches whatever numbers it can find and pronounces FT accounting somewhat "opaque". It's fashionable enough for struggling publications to talk of going online-only. Newsweek hinted at just that transition the other day. But digital existence can also be low profile, going on totally obscure. As predicted, Rupert Murdoch's tablet newspaper The Daily is finding cyberspace a cruel pool for making a splash: no news-stand visibility, no TV or radio summaries, no copies passed from hand to hand. A third of The Daily's staff were laid off last week.
It's no accident that big digital advertising launches still happen on posters, TV or via print. And FT editions on newsprint or online are complementary, one defined by familiarity with the other so that, as you sit at your screen in Singapore or Tokyo, the FT you scan there is given a special value by the personality and record of the paper version you can also buy. John Ridding, the FT's buoyant chief executive, may see a long-term strategy working, but he bridles at the thought of the paper being put to death. On the contrary, digital success had given it "a new lease of life" he told the Guardian last week.
Remember, too, that the FT's closest competitor, the Wall Street Journal – is big in print and big behind a paywall: 2.1m copies purchased, one way or another, every weekday.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/aug/05/digital-only-financial-times-difficult-trick